Thursday, March 28, 2019

[V. K. Ramachandran was a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and is at present vice chairman of the State Planning Board of the state of Kerala. He is the author of Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study. Previous discussions of Ramachandran's work in Understanding Society can be found here (link, link, link, link), and here is an interview I conducted with VK in 2008; link.]

[Acknowledgement: Extracted from Ramachandran, V. K., and Madhura Swaminathan, (eds.) (2018), Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, Tulika Books, New Delhi. This is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India.]"Gabriel Selvam: A Biography of Work"

V. K. Ramachandran

Among the many the many things in which N. Ram was an early instructor (and I not good enough a learner) was on how to interview, take notes, edit copy, and present the results from conversation and observation. NR was the first among us to meet Gabriel Selvam, and the description “upstanding young agricultural labourer” is his.

An Interview in Two Parts, 1977 and 2017

1977: Young Bonded Worker

G. Selvam (35) is an upstanding young agricultural labourer who has bonded himself as a pannaiyal (permanent farm servant) out of economic necessity. Selvam’s family is of the Parayar scheduled caste.

A loan of Rs 100 taken over six years ago from CT, a petty usurer, led directly to his present condition as farm servant. At that time, the loan was taken for subsistence needs and was perceived as a temporary expedient. On account of a 120 percent interest rate, the loan of Rs 100 became a liability of Rs 220 over a year. The usurer pressed Selvam, then 31 years old, to sell his house in order to repay the loan. Selvam, refusing to abandon the family house site, went around asking for a way to work off his debt. The opportunity presented itself in the form of the landlord SCC. This landlord, who was looking for a young and strong farm servant, was willing to advance the money to clear the debt, provided Selvam attached himself as a farm servant for a remuneration of Rs 65 per month plus one sheet and a dhoti, a shirt, and a towel-cloth (thundu) a year.

Selvam took an advance of Rs 100 for going to work as a farm servant, and used that to clear just under half his debt. Then, after the first month of work, he took a loan of Rs 120 to clear the debt.

Since then, that is, for six years, Selvam has been working for well over 13 hours a day. He worked at the salary of Rs 65 a month for four years. Two years ago, when paddy prices soared to nearly Rs 150 per 58-kilogram bag, the farm servants in the village asked their employers for a raise. Selvam was given a wage rise that was long overdue: in 1977 he was paid Rs 110 a month.

SCC, like some other big landlords in the village, has found it much to his advantage to hire a farm servant in this way. He has advanced small sums of money to Selvam over the years, sums always taken “temporarily,” but with no real chance of the debtor repaying the debt and getting out of his present condition. Selvam makes it clear that he is not paid anything near the remuneration he should be getting for this work. “There is no choice,” he says, “I can’t leave my mudalali (employer, landlord) unless I can clear my debt of Rs 300. I would certainly like to leave.”

In his childhood, Selvam was not as badly off as he is today. His father, Gabriel, was a poor or lower-middle peasant, cultivating surface-irrigated land that had been leased in from landlords of the village. His mother worked as a hired labourer.

His father sent Selvam to school. Selvam studied in the Mission School in Gokilapuram, down the road from where he lives today, up to the fifth class. He completed the sixth class at the NMR School in Gokilapuram. Selvam was a good student and his father sent him to Vatthalakundu, where Selvam studied in the seventh and eighth classes, finishing when he was 16 years old. He stayed at a hostel at Vatthalakundu, and his father sent him Rs 20 a month. Selvam returned to the village after finishing the eighth class. He can read and write Tamil and can still read some English.

Selvam’s father tilled 6 kuzhi (3.6 acres) of surface-irrigated land belonging to landlord ST on kuthagai (fixed rent) for 20 years. He also worked 1.5 acres of groundwater-irrigated land belonging to SP, a landlord of Uthamapalayam. Selvam also worked on the land leased in by the family. Selvam married when he was 20 years old. His wife, Alphonse, is from a family of tenant cultivators from Pudupatti in Uthamapalayam taluk.

In about 1967, there was a sharp decline in the agriculture conducted by the family. The surface-irrigated land had poor soil and bad drainage, and standing water after the rain affected the crop. The land was manured only for one crop, one of the reasons for the yield being poor. The groundwater-irrigated land had a well with plenty of water and had a pulley and rope to draw water with. But household cultivation was in decline, the family began to incur debt, and the age-old symbol of a peasant family heading towards destitution became apparent: the cattle owned by the family became thin and weak.

About the same time, eviction took place on a large scale in the village. Earlier, the paddy crops were the traditional parunnel and samba varieties; later, with the introduction of new seeds, yields were higher, and agriculture became more profitable for the landlords. There was also fear among them, Selvam said, that the tenants would assert their right to cultivate the land. Landlords brought pressure on the tenants to leave the land. Rents were raised, rack-rents were imposed on tenants. In some cases, landlords brought great pressure on tenants to leave, offering them small amounts of money to do so. The peasants were disunited, Selvam said, and, out of fear, accepted the money and left the land.

Agricultural Wage Work

Selvam made it clear that the big landlords can always bring pressure on agricultural labourers; as for agricultural labourers, there is little scope for their advance today. Opportunities for employment in some tasks have gone down since the arrival of tractors, Selvam pointed out. The tractor has robbed those with ploughs and bullocks of ploughing work, and those with carts and bullocks of work in basal manuring. Even during threshing, the tractor has deprived agricultural labourers of employment. While earlier, there would be four days’ work at the threshing-floor and four bullocks would be needed to trample the grain for the second threshing, now the tractor can be driven over the sheaves to complete the task in less than an hour.

Unemployment is high and wages are poor, and women’s wages have actually been brought down, from Rs 3 per day to Rs 2.50 per day. There was agitation by Communists five years ago in southern villages of the Valley, Selvam recalls, when men workers won an increase in their grain wages, from 4 measures per day to 5 measures, and women an increase to 3 measures for threshing.

While wages in the village do not vary directly with the caste of the worker, discrimination against the scheduled castes, the overwhelming majority of whom are landless labourers, is deeply entrenched. Most of the farm servants in the village are Dalit.

Selvam has an extremely busy working year. During the 1976-7 agricultural year, he worked on both crops of paddy on surface-irrigated land, in different operations in the cultivation of irrigated sorghum (cholam), finger millet (ragi), tomato, and banana on groundwater-irrigated land, and in little millet (samai) on unirrigated land. In addition to agricultural work every day, he did domestic tasks at the landlord’s house. Selvam’s wife Alphonse laboured at agricultural operations for 57 days in 1976-7, and earned Rs 158.70 as wages. She seeded and cleaned tamarind for 3 days, for which she earned Rs 7.50.

Selvam’s wage is lower than other farm servants in the village, some of whom are paid Rs 130 and Rs 140 by their landlord employers. But when Selvam asks for a wage increase, the landlord arrogantly insists: “I have already increased your wages. You used to get Rs 65, now you get 110.” The standard that SCC uses, Selvam says, is not the wage paid to other farm servants in the village, but the Rs 65 pittance that Selvam himself used to receive before he was paid Rs 110 a month.

When Selvam is unwell, the landlord may give Selvam a small amount of money to buy medicine, but he will not pay for treatment for Alphonse or the children when they fall ill.

As for his home, Selvam cannot afford to erect a complete hut. When he gets a small amount of money, he adds a row of bricks to the hut. Some months ago, he bought a door-frame. Now there is a door-frame, fixed with mud into a few rows of country-made brick, with no wall around it or roof above. The single room in the hut is 8 feet by 6 feet. “We do not know when this hut will be built,” Alphonse said. “We lay a few bricks, and it may be a few months before we can add more bricks. It may take years to complete the hut in this manner.”

With all this, Selvam must also face rudeness and shouts from the landlord, the loud arrogance of SCC as taskmaster of “his” farm servant.

“Life is difficult for me,” Selvam said. He sees his children at 5 a.m. (when he leaves the house), when the older children may be just beginning to wake up. It is seldom, and only in the slack season, that he comes home before they are asleep for the night. And the hours in between are filled with arduous, back-breaking labour that covers every task that an agricultural labourer in the village can perform.

I have seen Selvam, early in the morning, heaving farmyard manure on to a cart and driving the cart to the paddy-fields, unloading it in neat piles across the field. I have seen him, bare-chested, barefoot, and dressed in an old and torn lungi, with a soiled cloth on his head to protect him from the sun, walking with a hoe across his shoulder over the ridge east of the village on the road leading to SCC’s groundwater-irrigated field in neighbouring Anamalaiyanpatti. I have seen him at the field, cutting and clearing water channels before the electricity comes on and irrigation water rushes up; and in the banana field, hacking at the tough young shoots that grow by the banana trees, cutting dry and withered leaves off the tree, and straightening tree trunks with wooden props that have been chopped and shaped by him. I have seen him, in the evenings, working in SCC’s house, watering, feeding, and washing the cattle or chopping a tree trunk for firewood for SCC’s kitchen. I have seen him at the bus-stop in Uthamapalayam, straining to lift a motor pump, newly repaired, on to the carrier of a Gokilapuram-bound bus. Standing under a bus-shelter in Gokilapuram after 11 o’clock at night, I have heard the sound of a cart coming down the road from Anamalaiyanpatti. It is Selvam, urging the bullocks through pouring rain back to the house of SCC. I have seen him after 11.30 at night, rain smudging the red mud that clings to his face and body, entering his hut and eating gruel and pickle by the weak light of an oil lamp, and preparing to catch some sleep before the next day of labour begins.

Selvam states clearly that it is not “loyalty” that keeps him with the landlord. It is his debt and the difficulty of finding alternative employment if he were to leave. “I have heard of the union of agricultural labourers in East Thanjavur. A union is needed, unity of agricultural labourers is needed. If there were a union in Gokilapuram, I would join it.”

May 1977

2017: A Working Life

Selvam worked for a total of 13 years with SCC. When he left, he was paid a mere Rs 400 a month. Selvam said that about 4000 rupees were due to him and unpaid when he left SCC’s employment.

Selvam worked 15 years as a daily worker after he left the employment of SCC. Three years after he left, Selvam’s son Arokiyasami was married. Over the three years, Selvam spent one year as a worker in a cardamom estate in Parathodu in Kerala, owned by Shanmughavel of Pannaipuram.

Alphonse worked as a wage labourer all her working life, that is, until four years ago.

Ten years ago, Selvam began to work for Venkatesan, a retired college teacher. Selvam was hired at a wage of Rs 2000 a month. Venkatesan owns 10.8 acres of thottam land and 1.8 acres of nanjai land in the north of the village, on the banks of the Thamaraikulam irrigation tank, where he grows nendran banana and coconut.

Selvam comes to the field at 7 am every day, takes a break from about 11:00 to 2:30, and works again at the field till 6 pm. He takes care of the field, clears the channels for irrigation, works the locks of the pipes for drip irrigation, supervises and works with other wage workers at some operations (planting and harvest), and weeds and cleans the fields. He also keeps the main trunks of the banana trees free of unwanted side-shoots, and applies fertilizer and undertakes all other plant protection tasks.

After three years with the landlord, Selvam asked for a raise. His new wage was fixed at Rs 4,000 a month (the worker on the neighbouring field gets Rs 6,000 a month, he told us). The landlord agreed, and said that he would henceforth account for Selvam’s withdrawals against the new wage. For Selvam is not paid his wage on a fixed day every month. He takes money for expenses from the owner “whenever I need it,” for household expenses, for festivals. The employer says he is keeping an account; Selvam trusts him and says that he, too, keeps track of how much he has taken from the landlord. He estimates that he has credit of about Rs 10,000 with the landlord. There is no formal account of Selvam’s savings with the landlord.

Four years ago, Alphonse developed a swelling on her right knee. A doctor in Uthamapalayam gave her drugs and an injection, and the swelling “sank to her foot.” Blood and pus was drained with a large syringe from the foot. Alphonse was discharged from the hospital, and was told to spread an ointment on the wound. Selvam did this every day. Alphonse began to scratch the itchy wound before it had healed completely. She eats betel leaf and nuts with lime, and the lime paste on her finger began to inflame the wound. It turned septic. Selvam took her in his son Sekhar’s autorickshaw to Cumbum, where the doctor said that she needed emergency treatment at Theni. Alphonse was taken by ambulance to the Theni Government Medical College and Hospital, where the doctors advised emergency surgery. She had a second surgery, followed by a skin graft.

In the post-operative ward, Selvam watched people on the other beds, and began to realise the importance of dressing Alphonse’s wound correctly – that it was a task that needed an expert, something he could not do himself. He hired a person to change the bandage – at Rs 50 a day – for the three months they spent in the hospital.

Alphonse is back home now. She can move a bit – to the sitting platform in front of the house, to change her clothes, to go to the bathroom; but not more than that. “We do not know how long she will survive. She has never done anyone any wrong. When she goes, it will be to heaven.”

The Children

Arokiasamy (50), the oldest child of Selvam and Alphonse, works as a mason and has a small business as a contractor for constructing small houses. His wife, Sumathi, has a tenth class school-leaving certificate, and works in the panchayat office as a data collector. They have two children, a son, Maniprathi (22), now a student at a polytechnic in Namakkal, and a daughter, Sunitha (21). Sunitha completed a B. A. degree and is now married. Her husband works on the staff of a tea estate owned by N Ramakrishnan, former MLA from Cumbum.

Arokiamary (48), the only daughter of Selvam and Alphonse, is now almost completely blind. She looks after her parents and brother, the much-loved carer in the home.

Shekhar (46) lives in Gokilapuram. He owns an autorickshaw, from which he which earns an income of Rs 500 to Rs 1000 a day. His wife, Thilakam, is a manual worker in agriculture and at non-agricultural tasks. Their children, Merlyn Marcia and Praveen, their grandparents’ joy, study in class 1 and class 2 in the English-language medium section of the Savarimuthu Udayar Memorial Higher Secondary School, a reputed school in the neighbouring village of Rayappanpatti.

Vedamuthu (44) stays at home with his parents. He is a person with intellectual disabilities, and is unable to go regularly to work.

Xavier (41), the youngest son of the family, works at loading and unloading bags of rice at the government civil supplies godown in Uthamapalayam. His wife Muthuarokiyam and he are now residents of Uthamapalayam, where his children Akhilesh, Vimalesh, and Pratibha go to school. Xavier earns 600 rupees a day, and an extra 1000 rupees a month for the manual work at the godown.

Forty Years On

Selvam and family live today in the house whose initial construction costs led him into bondage in 1977. It is completed and expanded now, a neat whitewashed structure that has the meagre furniture and appurtenances of a house that is still, after all, the house of a full-time rural manual worker. They were exploited and extremely poor – near destitute – in 1977. Today, they are still poor, Selvam’s wages are low, and he has no knowledge of how much of his earned wages are held by his employer. But he is no longer destitute, no longer in bondage, and no longer at the mercy of a harsh and cruel landlord of the old type.

They are better off now than they were in 1977 – oh yes, of course we are, Selvam says. Our house is complete, and we never go hungry, we have special things to eat: egg curry twice a week, chicken on Sundays, fish once in about twenty days. Thanks to the public system for the distribution of cereal, there is enough rice for the family. The house has been electrified (Selvam says that they received their electricity connection at the same time, conveniently, as their son Arokiasami’s wedding).

I have continued to meet Selvam over the years. I was associated with resurveys of Gokilapuram village in 1986 and 1999, and continue to be interested in changing agrarian relations in the village and region. I return to the Cumbum Valley regularly for tasks connected with the Gokilapuram Educational Trust, an organisation of which the honoree of this volume is a founder trustee. Travel to the Valley gives me an opportunity to keep in touch with Selvam; as we grow older, we grow more conscious of the value of old friendships.

Selvam asks me if I remember the little kerosene lamp (of course I do -- made of tin and with a flimsy glass chimney) that I used during our survey in 1977. I used it after dark during conversations and interviews in homes that had no electricity. You gave it to me when you left the village after the survey, he says. After electricity came to the house Selvam stored the lamp deep in a loft, where it remains today. He keeps it as a reminder of his friend -- and of the days when they had only a single lamp for light in a half-constructed house.

I am currently writing a book on the topic of the "social ontology of government". My goal is to provide a short treatment of the social mechanisms and entities that constitute the workings of government. The book will ask some important basic questions: what kind of thing is "government"? (I suggest it is an agglomeration of organizations, social networks, and rules and practices, with no overriding unity.) What does government do? (I simplify and suggest that governments create the conditions of social order and formulate policies and rules aimed at bringing about various social priorities that have been selected through the governmental process.) How does government work -- what do we know about the social and institutional processes that constitute its metabolism? (How do government entities make decisions, gather needed information, and enforce the policies they construct?)

In my treatment of the topic of the workings of government I treat the idea of "dysfunction" with the same seriousness as I do topics concerning the effective and functional aspects of governmental action. Examples of dysfunctions include principal-agent problems, conflict of interest, loose coupling of agencies, corruption, bribery, and the corrosive influence of powerful outsiders. It is interesting to me that this topic -- ontology of government -- has unexpectedly crossed over with another of my interests, the organizational causes of largescale accidents.

In light of these interests, I find the front page of the New York Times on March 28, 2019 to be a truly fascinating amalgam of the social ontology of government, with a heavy dose of dysfunction. Every story on the front page highlights one feature or another of the workings and failures of government. Let's briefly name these features. (The item numbers flow roughly from upper right to lower left.)

Item 1 is the latest installment of the Boeing 737 MAX story. Failures of regulation and a growing regime of "collaborative regulation" in which the FAA delegates much of the work of certification of aircraft safety to the manufacturer appear at this early stage to be a part of the explanation of this systems failure. This was the topic of a recent post (link).

Items 2 and 3 feature the processes and consequences of failed government -- the social crisis in Venezuela created in part by the breakdown of legitimate government, and the fundamental and continuing inability of the British government and its prime minister to arrive at a rational and acceptable policy on an issue of the greatest importance for the country. Given that decision-making and effective administration of law are fundamental functions of government, these two examples are key contributions to the ontology of government. The Brexit story also highlights the dysfunctions that flow from the shameful self-dealing of politicians and leaders who privilege their own political interests over the public good. Boris Johnson, this one's for you!

Item 4 turns us to the dynamics of presidential political competition. This item falls on the favorable side of the ledger, illustrating the important role that a strong independent press has in helping to inform the public about the past performance and behavior of candidates for high office. It is an important example of depth journalism and provides the public with accurate, nuanced information about an appealing candidate with a policy history as mayor that many may find unpalatable. The story also highlights the role that non-governmental organizations have in politics and government action, in this instance the ACLU.

Item 5 brings us inside the White House and gives the reader a look at the dynamics and mechanisms through which a small circle of presidential advisors are able to determine a particular approach to a policy issue that they favor. It displays the vulnerability the office of president shows to the privileged insiders' advice concerning policies they personally favor. Whether it is Mick Mulvaney, acting chief of staff to the current president, or Robert McNamara's advice to JFK and LBJ leading to escalation in Vietnam, the process permits ideologically committed insiders to wield extraordinary policy power.

Item 6 turns to the legislative process, this time in the New Jersey legislature, on the topic of the legalization of marijuana. This story too falls on the positive side of the "function-dysfunction" spectrum, in that it describes a fairly rational and publicly visible process of fact-gathering and policy assessment by a number of New Jersey legislators, leading to the withdrawal of the legislation.

Item 7 turns to the mechanisms of private influence on government, in a particularly unsavory but revealing way. The story reveals details of a high-end dinner "to pa tribute to the guest of honor, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo." The article writes, "Lobbyists told their clients that the event would be a good thing to go to", at a minimum ticket price of $25,000 per couple. This story connects the dots between private interest and efforts to influence governmental policy. In this case the dots are not very far apart.

With a little effort all these items could be mapped onto the diagram of the interconnections within and across government and external social groups provided above.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The recent crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX aircraft raise questions about the safety certification process through which this modified airframe was certified for use by the FAA. Recent accounts of the design and manufacture of the aircraft demonstrate an enormous pressure for speed and great pressure to reduce costs. Attention has focused on a software system, MCAS, which was a feature needed to adapt to the aerodynamics created by repositioning of larger engines on the existing 737 body. The software was designed to automatically intervene to prevent stall if a single sensor in the nose indicated unacceptable angle of ascent. The crash investigations are not complete, but current suspicions are that the pilots in the two aircraft were unable to control or disable the nose-down response of the system in the roughly 40 seconds they had to recover control of the aircraft. (James Fallows provides a good and accessible account of the details of the development of the 737 MAX in a story in the Atlantic; link.)

The question here concerns the regulatory background of the aircraft: was the certification process through which the 737 MAX was certified to fly a sufficiently rigorous and independent one?

Thomas Kaplan details in a New York Times article the division of responsibility that has been created in the certification process over the past several decades between the FAA and the manufacturer (NYT 3/27/19). Under this program, the FAA delegates a substantial part of the work of certification evaluation to the manufacturer and its engineering staff. Kaplan writes:

In theory, delegating much of the day-to-day regulatory work to Boeing allows the FAA to focus its limited resources on the most critical safety work, taps into existing industry technical expertise at a time when airliners are becoming increasingly complex, and allows Boeing in particular to bring out new planes faster at a time of intense global competition with its European rival Airbus.

However, it is apparent to both outsiders and insiders that this creates the possibility of impairing the certification process by placing crucial parts of the evaluation in the hands of experts whose interests and careers lie in the hands of the corporation whose product they are evaluating. This is an inherent conflict of interest for the employee, and it is potentially a critical flaw in the process from the point of view of safety. (See an earlier post on the need for an independent and empowered safety officer within complex and risky processes; link.)

Senator Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut) highlighted this concern when he wrote to the inspector general last week: "The staff responsible for regulating aircraft safety are answerable to the manufacturers who profit from cutting corners, not the American people who may be put at risk."

A 2011 audit report from the Transportation Department's inspector general's office highlighted exactly this kind of issue: "The report cited an instance where FAA engineers were concerned about the 'integrity' of an employee acting on the agency's behalf at an unnamed manufacturer because the employee was 'advocating a position that directly opposed FAA rules on an aircraft fuel system in favor of the manufacturer'." The article makes the point that Congress has encouraged this program of delegation in order to constrain budget requirements for the federal agency.

Kaplan notes that there is also a worrisome degree of exchange of executive staff between the FAA and the airline industry, raising the possibility that the industry's priorities about cost and efficiency may unduly influence the regulatory agency:

The part of the FAA under scrutiny, the Transport Airplane Directorate, was led at the time by an aerospace engineer names Ali Bahrami. The next year, he took a job at the Aerospace Industries Association, a trade group whose members include Boeing. In that position, he urged his former agency to allow manufacturers like Boeing to perform as much of the work of certifying new planes as possible. Mr. Bahrami is now back at the FAA as its top safety official.

This episode illustrates one of the key dysfunctions of organizations that have been highlighted elsewhere here: the workings of conflict of commitment and interest within an organization, and the ability that the executives of an organization have to impose behavior and judgment on their employees that are at odds with the responsibilities these individuals have to other important social goods, including airline safety. The episode has a lot in common with the sequence of events leading to the launch of Space Shuttle Challenger (Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA).

Over the last 30 years, the U.S. state has retreated from its regulatory responsibility over private-sector economic activities. Over the same period, a celebratory literature, mostly in political science, has developed, characterizing the current period as the rise of the regulatory state or regulatory capitalism. The notion of regulation in this literature, however, is a perverse one—one in which regulators mostly advise rather than direct, and industry and firm self- regulation is the norm. As a result, new and potentially dangerous technologies such as fracking or mortgage backed derivatives are left unregulated, and older necessary regulations such as prohibitions are weakened. This article provides a joint criticism of the celebratory literature and the deregulation reality, and strongly advocates for a new sociology of regulation that both recognizes and documents these failures. (203)

The 2015 article highlights some of the precise sources of failure that seem to be evident in the 737 MAX case. "Government assumes a coordinating rather than a directive role, in this account, as regulators draw upon industry best practices, its standard-setting proclamations, and encourage self-monitoring" (203). This is precisely what current reporting demonstrates about the FAA relationship to the manufacturers.

One of the key flaws of self-monitoring is the lack of truly independent inspectors:

Part of the problem stems from the failure of firms to select truly independent inspectors. Firms can, in fact, select their own inspectors—for example, firemen or police from the local areas who are quite conscious of the economic power of the local chemical firm they are to inspect. (205)

Here again, the Boeing 737 MAX certification story seems to illustrate this defect as well.
How serious are these "cracked regulatory institutions"? According to Perrow they are deadly serious. Here is Perrow's summary assessment about the relationship between regulatory failure and catastrophe:

Almost every major industrial accident in recent times has involved either regulatory failure or the deregulation demanded by business and industry. For more examples, see Perrow (2011). It is hard to make the case that the industries involved have failed to innovate because of federal regulation; in particular, I know of no innovations in the safety area that were stifled by regulation. Instead, we have a deregulated state and deregulated capitalism, and rising environmental problems accompanied by growing income and wealth inequality. (210)

In short, we seem to be at the beginning of an important reveal of the cost of neoliberal efforts to minimize regulation and to pass the responsibility for safety significantly to the manufacturer.

Monday, March 25, 2019

Readers may be skeptical about the practical importance of the topic of nuclear power plant siting decisions, since very few new nuclear plants have been proposed or approved in the United States for decades. However, the topic is one for which there is an extensive historical record, and it is a process that illuminates the challenge for government to balance risk and benefit, private gain and public cost. Moreover, siting inherently brings up issues that are both of concern to the public in general (throughout a state or region of the country) and to the citizens who live in close proximity to the recommended site. The NIMBY problem is unavoidable -- it is someone's backyard, and it is a worrisome neighbor. So this is a good case in terms of which to think creatively about the responsibilities of government for ensuring the public good in the face of risky private activity, and the detailed institutions of regulation and oversight that would work to make wise public outcomes more likely.

I've been thinking quite a bit recently about technology failure, government regulation, and risky technologies, and there is a lot to learn about these subjects by looking at the history of nuclear power in the United States. Two books in particular have been interesting to me. Neither is particularly recent, but both shed valuable light on the public-policy context of nuclear decision-making. The first is Joan Aron's account of the processes that led to the cancellation of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island in the 1970s (Licensed To Kill?: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Shoreham Power Plant) and the second is Donald Stever, Jr.'s account of the licensing process for the Seabrook nuclear power plant in Seabrook and The Nuclear Regulatory Commission: The Licensing of a Nuclear Power Plant. Both are fascinating books and well worthy of study as a window into government decision-making and regulation. Stever's book is especially interesting because it is a highly capable analysis of the licensing process, both at the state level and at the level of the NRC, and because Stever himself was a participant. As an assistant attorney general in New Hampshire he was assigned the role of Counsel for the Public throughout the process in New Hampshire.

Joan Aron’s 1997 book Licensed to Kill? is a detailed case study the effort to establish the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island in the 1980s. LILCO had proposed the plant to respond to rising demand for electricity on Long Island as population and energy use rose. And Long Island is a long, narrow island on which traffic congestion at certain times of day is legendary. Evacuation planning was both crucial and in the end, perhaps impossible.

This is an intriguing story, because it led eventually to the cancellation of the operating license for the plant by the NRC after completion of the plant. And the cancellation resulted largely from the effectiveness of public opposition and interest-group political pressure. Aron provides a detailed account of the decisions made by the public utility company LILCO, the AEC and NRC, New York state and local authorities, and citizen activist groups that led to the costliest failed investment in the history of nuclear power in the United States.

In 1991 the NRC made the decision to rescind the operating license for the Shoreham plant, after completion at a cost of over $5 billion but before it had generated a kilowatt of electricity.

Aron’s basic finding is that the project collapsed in costly fiasco because of a loss of trust among the diverse stakeholders: LILCO, the Long Island public, state and local agencies and officials, scientific experts, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Long Island tabloid Newsday played a role as well, sensationalizing every step of the process and contributing to public distrust of the process. Aron finds that the NRC and LILCO underestimated the need for full analysis of safety and emergency preparedness issues raised by the plant’s design, including the issue of evacuation from a largely inaccessible island full of two million people in the event of disaster. LILCO’s decision to upscale the capacity of the plant in the middle of the process contributed to the failure as well. And the occurrence of the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 gave new urgency to the concerns experienced by citizens living within fifty miles of the Shoreham site about the risks of a nuclear plant.

As we have seen, Shoreham failed to operate because of intense public opposition, in which the governor played a key role, inspired in part by the utility’s management incompetence and distrust of the NRC. Inefficiencies in the NRC licensing process were largely irrelevant to the outcome. The public by and large ignored NRC’s findings and took the nonsafety of the plant for granted. (131)

The most influential issue was public safety: would it be possible to perform an orderly evacuation of the population near the plant in the event of a serious emergency? Clarke and Perrow (included in Helmut Anheier, ed., When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns) provide an extensive analysis of the failures that occurred during tests of the emergency evacuation plan designed by LILCO. As they demonstrate, the errors that occurred during the evacuation test were both “normal” and potentially deadly.

One thing that comes out of both books is the fact that the commissioning and regulatory processes are far from ideal examples of the rational development of sound public policy. Rather, business interests, institutional shortcomings, lack of procedural knowledge by committee chairs, and dozens of other factors lead to outcomes that appear to fall far short of what the public needs. But in addition to ordinary intrusions into otherwise rational policy deliberations, there are other reasons to believe that decision-making is more complicated and less rational than a simple model of rational public policy formation would suggest. Every decision-maker brings a set of “framing assumptions” about the reality concerning which he or she is deliberating. These framing assumptions impose an unavoidable kind of cognitive bias into collective decision-making. A business executive brings a worldview to the question of regulation of risk that is quite different from that of an ecologist or an environmental activist. This is different from the point often made about self-interest; our framing assumptions do not feel like expressions of self-interest, but rather simply secure convictions about how the world works and what is important in the world. This is one reason why the work of social scientists like Scott Page (The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies) on the value of diversity in problem-solving and decision-making is so important: by bringing multiple perspectives and cognitive frames to a problem, we are more likely to get a balanced decision that gives appropriate weight to the legitimate interests and concerns of all involved.

Here is an interesting concrete illustration of cognitive bias (with a generous measure of self-interest as well) in Stever’s discussion of siting decisions for nuclear power plants:

From the time a utility makes the critical in-house decision to choose a site, any further study of alternatives is necessarily negative in approach. Once sufficient corporate assets have been sunk into the chosen site to produce data adequate for state site review, the company's management has a large enough stake in it to resist suggestions that a full study of site alternatives be undertaken as a part of the state (or for that matter as a part of the NEPA) review process. hence, the company's methodological approach to evaluating alternates to the chosen site will always be oriented toward the desired conclusion that the chosen site is superior. (Stever 1980 : 30)

This is the bias of sunk costs, both inside the organization and in the cognitive frames of independent decision makers in state agencies.

Stever’s central point here is a very important one: the pace of site selection favors the energy company’s choices over the concerns and preferences of affected groups because the company is in a position to have dedicated substantial resources to development of the preferred site proposal. Likewise, scientific experts have a difficult time making their concerns about habitat or traffic flow heard in the context.

But here is a crucial thing to observe: the siting decision is only one of dozens in the development of a new power plant, which is itself only one of hundreds of government / business decisions made every year. What Stever describes is a structural bias in the regulatory process, not a one-off flaw. At its bottom, this is the task that government faces when considering the creation of a new nuclear power plant: “to assess the various public and private costs and benefits of a site proposed by a utility” (32); and Stever’s analysis makes it doubtful that existing public processes do this in a consistent and effective way. Stever argues that government needs to have more of a role in site selection, not less, as pro-market advocates demand: “The kind of social and environmental cost accounting required for a balanced initial assessment of, and development of, alternative sites should be done by a public body acting not as a reviewer of private choices, but as an active planner” (32).

Notice how this scheme shifts the pace and process from the company to the relevant state agency. The preliminary site selection and screening is done by a state site planning agency, with input then invited from the utilities companies, interest groups, and a formal environmental assessment. This places the power squarely in the hands of the government agency rather than the private owner of the plant -- reflecting the overriding interest the public has in ensuring health, safety, and environmental controls.

Stever closes a chapter on regulatory issues with these cogent recommendations (38-39):

Electric utility companies should not be responsible for decisions concerning early nuclear-site planning.

Early site identification, evaluation, and inventorying is a public responsibility that should be undertaken by a public agency, with formal participation by utilities and interest groups, based upon criteria developed by the state legislature.

Prior to the use of a particular site, the state should prepare a complete environmental assessment for it, and hold adjudicatory hearings on contested issues.

Further effort should be made toward assessing the public risk of nuclear power plant sites.

In areas like New England, characterized by geographically small states and high energy demand, serious efforts should be made to develop regional site planning and evaluation.

Nuclear licensing reform should focus on the quality of decision-making.

There should be a continued federal presence in nuclear site selection, and the resolution of environmental problems should not be delegated entirely to the states.

(It is very interesting to me that I have not been able to locate a full organizational study of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself.)

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Is there such a thing as “philosophy of technology”? Is there a “philosophy of cooking” or a “philosophy of architecture”? All of these are practical activities – praxis – with large bodies of specialized knowledge and skill involved in their performance. But where does philosophy come in?

Most of us trained in analytic philosophy think of a philosophical topic as one that can be formulated in terms of a small number of familiar questions: what are the nature and limitations of knowledge in this area? What ethical or normative problems does this area raise? What kinds of conceptual issues need to be addressed before we can discuss problems in this area clearly and intelligently? Are there metaphysical issues raised by this area -- special kinds of things that need special philosophical attention? Does "technology" support this kind of analytical approach?

We might choose to pursue a philosophy of technology in an especially minimalist (and somewhat Aristotelian) way, along these lines:

Human beings have needs and desires that require material objects for their satisfaction.

Human beings engage in practical activity to satisfy their needs and desires.

Intelligent beings often seek to utilize and modify their environments so as to satisfy their needs and desires.

Physical bodies are capable of rudimentary environment modification, which may permit adequate satisfaction of needs and desires in propitious environments (dolphins).

Intelligent beings often seek to develop "tools" to extend the powers of their bodies to engage in environment modification.

The use of tools produces benefits and harms for self and others, which raises ethical issues.

Now we can introduce the idea of the accumulation of knowledge ("science"):

Human beings have the capacity to learn how the world around them works, and they can learn the causal properties of materials and natural entities.

Knowledge of causal properties permits intelligent intervention in the world.

Gaining scientific knowledge of the world creates the possibility of the invention of knowledge-based artifacts (instruments, tools, weapons).

And history suggests we need to add a few Hobbesian premises:

Human beings often find themselves in conflict with other agents for resources supporting the satisfaction of their needs and desires.

Intelligent beings seek to develop tools (weapons) to extend the powers of their bodies to engage in successful conflict with other agents.

Finally, history seems to make it clear that tools, machines, and weapons are not purely individual products; rather, social circumstances and social conflict influence the development of the specific kinds of tools, machines, and weapons that are created in a particular historical setting.

The idea of technology can now be fitted into the premises identified here. Technology is the sum of a set of tools, machines, and practical skills available at a given time in a given culture through which needs and interests are satisfied and the dialectic of power and conflict furthered.

This treatment suggests several leading questions for a philosophy of technology:

How does technology relate to human nature and human needs?

How does technology relate to intelligence and creativity?

How does technology relate to scientific knowledge?

How does technology fit into the logic of warfare?

How does technology fit into the dialectic of social control among groups?

How does technology relate to the social, historical, and cultural environment?

Is the process of technology change determined by the technical characteristics of the technology?

How does technology relate to issues of justice and morality?

Here are a few important contributions to several of these topics.

Lynn White's Medieval Technology and Social Change illustrates almost all elements of this configuration. His classic book begins with the dynamics of medieval warfare (the impact of the development of the stirrup on mounted combat); proceeds to food production (the development and social impact of the heavy iron plough); and closes with medieval machines.

Charles Sabel's treatment of industrialization and the creation of powered machinery in Work and Politics: The Division of Labour in Industry addresses topic 5; Sabel demonstrates how industrialization and the specific character of mechanization that ensued was a process substantially guided by conflicts of interest between workers and owners, and technologies were selected by owners that reduced the powers of resistance of workers. Sabel and Zeitlin make this argument in greater detail in World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization. One of their most basic arguments is the idea that firms are strategic and adaptive as they deal with a current set of business challenges. Rather than an inevitable logic of new technologies and their organizational needs, we see a highly adaptive and selective process in which firms pick and choose among alternatives, often mixing the choices to hedge against failure. They consider carefully a range of possible changes on the horizon, a set of possible strategic adaptations that might be selected; and they frequently hedge their bets by investing in both the old and the new technology. "Economic agents, we found again and again in the course of the seminar's work, do not maximize so much as they strategize" (5). (Here is a more extensive discussion of Sabel and Zeitlin; link.)

The logic underlying the idea of technological inevitability (topic 7) goes something like this: a new technology creates a set of reasonably accessible new possibilities for achieving new forms of value: new products, more productive farming techniques, or new ways of satisfying common human needs. Once the technology exists, agents or organizations in society will recognize those new opportunities and will attempt to take advantage of them by investing in the technology and developing it more fully. Some of these attempts will fail, but others will succeed. So over time, the inherent potential of the technology will be realized; the technology will be fully exploited and utilized. And, often enough, the technology will both require and force a new set of social institutions to permit its full utilization; here again, agents will recognize opportunities for gain in the creation of social innovations, and will work towards implementing these social changes.

This view of history doesn't stand up to scrutiny, however. There are many examples of technologies that failed to come to full development (the water mill in the ancient world and the Betamax in the contemporary world). There is nothing inevitable about the way in which a technology will develop -- imposed, perhaps, by the underlying scientific realities of the technology; and there are numerous illustrations of a more complex back-and-forth between social conditions and the development of a technology. So technological determinism is not a credible historical theory.

Thomas Hughes addresses topic 6 in his book, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture. Here Hughes considers how technology has affected our cultures in the past two centuries. The twentieth-century city, for example, could not have existed without the inventions of electricity, steel buildings, elevators, railroads, and modern waste-treatment technologies. So technology "created" the modern city. But it is also clear that life in the twentieth-century city was transformative for the several generations of rural people who migrated to them. And the literature, art, values, and social consciousness of people in the twentieth century have surely been affected by these new technology systems. Each part of this complex story involves processes that are highly contingent and highly intertwined with social, economic, and political relationships. And the ultimate shape of the technology is the result of decisions and pressures exerted throughout the web of relationships through which the technology took shape. But here is an important point: there is no moment in this story where it is possible to put "technology" on one side and "social context" on the other. Instead, the technology and the society develop together.

Peter Galison's treatment of the simultaneous discovery of the relativity of time measurement by Einstein and Poincaré in Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time provides a valuable set of insights into topic 3. Galison shows that Einstein's thinking was very much influenced by practical issues in the measurement of time by mechanical devices. This has an interesting corollary: the scientific imagination is sometimes stimulated by technology issues, just as technology solutions are created through imaginative use of new scientific theories.

Topic 8 has produced an entire field of research of its own. The morality of the use of autonomous drones in warfare; the ethical issues raised by CRISPR technology in human embryos; the issues of justice and opportunity created by the digital divide between affluent people and poor people; privacy issues created by ubiquitous facial recognition technology -- all these topics raise important moral and social-justice issues. Here is an interesting thought piece by Michael Lynch in the Guardian on the topic of digital privacy (link). Lynch is the author of The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data.

So, yes, there is such a thing as the philosophy of technology. But to be a vibrant and intellectually creative field, it needs to be cross-disciplinary, and as interested in the social and historical context of technology as it is the conceptual and normative issues raised by the field.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

The possibility or likelihood of conflict of interest is present in virtually all professions and occupations. We expect a researcher, a physician, or a legislator to perform her work according to the highest values and norms of their work (searching for objective knowledge, providing the best care possible for the patient, drafting and supporting legislation in order to enhance the public good). But there is always the possibility that the individual may have private financial interests that distort or bias the work she does, and there may be large companies that have a financial interest in one set of actions rather than another.

Marc Rodwin's Conflicts of Interest and the Future of Medicine: The United States, France, and Japan is a rigorous and fair treatment of this issue with respect to conflicts of interest in the field of medicine. Rodwin has published extensively on this topic, and the current book is an important exploration of how professional ethics, individual interest, and business and professional institutions intersect to influence practitioner behavior in this field. The institutional actors in this story include the pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, insurers, hospitals and physician partnerships, and legislators and regulators. Rodwin shows in detail how differences in insurance policies, physician reimbursement policies, and gifts and benefits from health-related businesses to physicians contribute to an institutional environment where the physician's choices are all too easily influenced by considerations other than the best health outcomes of the patient. Rodwin finds that the institutional setting for health economics is different in the US, France, and Japan, and that these differences lead to differences in physician behavior.

Here is Rodwin's clear statement of the material situation that creates the possibility or likelihood of conflicts of interest in medicine.

Physicians earn their living through their medical work and so may practice in ways that enhance their income rather than the interests of patients. Moreover, when physicians prescribe drugs, devices, and treatments and choose who supplies these or refer patients to other providers, they affect the fortunes of third parties. As a result, providers, suppliers, and insurers try to influence physicians' clinical decisions for their own benefit. Thus, at the core of doctoring lies tension between self-interest and faithful service to patients and the public. The prevailing powerful medical ethos does influence physicians. Still, there is conflict between professional ethics and financial incentives. (kl 251)

Jerome Kassirer is a former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and an expert observer of the field, and he provided a foreword to the book. Kassirer describes the current situation in the medical economy in these terms, drawing on his own synthesis of recent research and journalism:

Professionalism had been steadily eroded by complex financial ties between practicing physicians and academic physicians on the one hand and the pharmaceutical, medical device, and biotechnology industries on the other. These financial ties were deep and wide: they threatened to bias the clinical research on which physicians relied to care for the sick, and they permeated nearly every aspect of medical care. Physicians were accepting gifts, taking free trips, serving on companies' speakers' bureaus, signing their names to articles written for them by industry-paid ghostwriters, and engaging in research that endangered patient care. (kl 73)

The fundamental problem posed by Rodwin's book is this set of questions:

In what context can physicians be trusted to act in their patients' interests? How can medical practice be organized to minimize physicians' conflicts of interest? How can society promote what is best in medical professionalism? What roles should physicians and organized medicine play in the medical economy? What roles should insurers, the state, and markets play in medical care? (kl 267)

The book sheds light on dozens of institutional arrangements that create the likelihood of conflicted choices, or that reduce that likelihood. One of those arrangements is the question for a non-profit hospital of whether the physicians are employed with a fixed salary or work on a fee-for-service basis. The latter system gives the physician a very different set of financial interests, including the possibility of making clinical choices that increase revenues to the physician or his or her group practice.

Consider physicians employed as public servants in public hospitals. Typically, they receive a fixed salary set by rank, enjoy tenure, and have clinical discretion. As a result, they lack financial incentives that bias their choices and have clinical freedom. Such arrangements preclude employment conflicts of interest. But relax some of these conditions and employers can compromise medical practice.... Furthermore, emplloyers can manage physicians to promote the organization's goals. As a result, employed physicians might practice in ways that promote their employer's over their patients' interests. (kl 445)

And the disadvantages for the patient of the self-employed physician are also important:

Payment can encourage physicians to supply more, less, or different kinds of services, or to refer to particular providers. Each form of payment has some bias, but some compromise clinical decisions more than others do. (kl 445)

Plainly, the circumstances and economic institutions described here are relevant to many other occupations as well. Scientists, policymakers, regulators, professors, and accountants all face similar circumstances -- though the financial stakes in medicine are particularly high. (Here is an earlier post on corporate efforts to influence scientific research; link.)

This field of research makes an important contribution to a particular challenging topic in contemporary healthcare. But Rodwin's study also provides an important contribution to the new institutionalism, since it serves as a micro-level case study of the differences in behavior created by differences in institutional rules and practices.

Each country's laws, insurance, and medical institutions shape medical practice; and within each country, different forms of practice affect clinical choices. (kl 218)

This feature of the book allows it to contribute to the kinds of arguments on the causal and historical importance of specific configurations of institutions offered by Kathleen Thelen (link) and Frank Dobbin (link).

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

A recurring topic in Understanding Society is the question of the organizational causes that lie in the background of major accidents and technological disasters. One such disaster is the catastrophic collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa in August, 2018, which resulted in the deaths of 43 people. Was this a technological failure, a design failure -- or importantly a failure in which private and public organizational features led to the disaster?

A major story in the New York Times on March 5, 2019 (link) makes it clear that social and organizational causes were central to this horrendous failure. (What could be more terrifying than having the highway bridge under your vehicle collapse to the earth 150 feet beneath you?) In this case it is evident from the Times coverage that a major cause of the disaster was the relationship between Autostrade per l'Italia, the private company that manages the bridge and derives enormous profit from it, and the regulatory ministries responsible for regulating and supervising safe operations of highways and bridges.

In a sign of the arrogance of wealth and power involved in the relationship, the Benetton family threatened a multimillion dollar lawsuit against the economist Marco Ponti who had served on an expert panel advising the government and had made strong statements about the one-sided relationship that existed. The threat was not acted upon, but the abuse of power is clear.

This appears to be a textbook case of "regulatory capture", a situation in which the private owners of a risky enterprise or activity use their economic power to influence or intimidate the government regulatory agencies that nominally oversee their activities. "Autostrade reaped huge profits and acquired so much power that the state became a largely passive regulatory" (NYT March 5, 2019). Moreover, independent governmental oversight was crippled by the fact that "the company effectively regulated itself-- because Autostrade's parent company owned the inspection company responsible for safety checks on the Morandi Bridge" (NYT). The Times quotes Carlo Scarpa, and economics professor at the University of Brescia:

Any investor would have been worried about bidding. The Benettons, though, knew the system and they understood that the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, which was supposed to supervise the whole thing, was weak. They were able to calculate the weight the company would have in the political arena. (NYT March 5, 2019)

And this seems to have worked out as the family expected:

Autostrade became a political powerhouse, acquiring clout that the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, perpetually underfunded and employing a small fraction of the staff, could not match. (NYT March 5, 2019)

The story notes that the private company made a great deal of money from this contract, but that the state also benefited financially. "Autostrade has poured billions of euros into state coffers, paying nearly 600 million euros a year in corporate taxes, V.A.T. and license fees."

The story also surfaces other social factors that played a role in the disaster, including opposition by Genoa residents to the construction involved in creating a potential bypass to the bridge.

Here is what the Times story has to say about the inspections that occurred:

Beyond fixing blame for the bridge collapse, a central question of the Morandi tragedy is what happened to safety inspections. The answer is that the inspectors worked for Autostrade more than for the state. For decades, Spea Engineering, a Milan-based company, has performed inspections on the bridge. If nominally independent, Spea is owned by Autostrade's parent company, Atlantia, and Autostrade is also Spea's largest customer. Spea's offices in Rome and elsewhere are housed inside Autostrade. One former bridge design engineer for Spea, Giulio Rambelli, described Autostrade's control over Spea as "absolute," (NYT March 5, 2019)

The story notes that this relationship raises the possibility of conflicts of interest that are prohibited in other countries. The story quotes Professor GiulianoFonderico: "All this suggests a system failure."

The failure appears to be first and foremost a failure of the state to fulfill its obligations of regulation and oversight of dangerous activities. By ceding any real and effective system of safety inspection to the business firms who are benefitting from the operations of the bridge, the state has essentially given up its responsibility of ensuring the safety of the public.

It is also worth underlining the point made in the article about the huge mismatch that exists between the capacities of the business firms in question and the agencies nominally charged to regulate and oversee them. This is a system-level failure at a higher level, since it highlights the fact of the power imbalance that almost always exists between large corporate wealth and the government agencies charged to oversee their activities.

Friday, March 1, 2019

When philosophers think of action they generally have in mind a combination of intentionality and simple motor movements. "John flips the switch to turn on the lights." But a great deal of human action is substantially more complex than this. Skilled bodily performance -- playing the piano, returning a tennis serve, fabricating a guitar -- seems to require a sustained treatment from within cognitive science. Bodily action is a cognitive activity. It is enlightening to learn that there is in fact such a field. It turns out that the cognitive science of skilled bodily action is creating a great deal of highly interesting work. Some of that research is happening at Ruhr University-Bochum, and my exposure to this group of researchers last month was very rewarding. (Thanks, Albert Newen, for your warm introduction to the work your group is doing.)

Elisabeth Pacherie has made major contributions to this field, bridging philosophy and cognitive science in her effort to contribute to a richer understanding of skilled bodily action. Her perspective has been to argue that bodily action is intentional and cognitive all the way down, and is dependent on mental representations of the field of action. She emphasizes that skilled action involves situated awareness and flexible control, at a granular level of bodily action. She and collaborator Myrto Mylopoulos provide a recent statement of their views in "Intentions and motor representations: the interface challenge" (link). Here is the abstract to their article:

Abstract A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called "Interface Problem". First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s (2014) recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a "content-preserving causal process" taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work.

Another useful presentation of their work is offered in "Intentions: The dynamic hierarchical model revisited"; link.

Another key contributor to this field is Ellen Fridland. Her article, "Skill and motor control: intelligence all the way down" provides a compelling framework for analyzing skilled bodily action (link). Her fundamental insight is that we are not justified in analyzing bodily activity into higher processes (thought and decision) and lower processes (habits of motor control, learned reflexes). Intelligence comes into skilled action only at the higher level, the "propositional" level. What this fails to see, however, is that intelligence pervades skilled action all the way down, with fine-grained motor movements being affected by perception and opportunity at a very granular level. "In short, for [Stanley and Krakauer (link), Papineau (link), and Stanley and Williamson (link)], skill combines intelligent guidance by propositional knowledge with the noncognitive, basic, subpersonal, low-level motor and perceptual abilities. The propositional bit of skill is knowledge-involving while the motor acuity bit is not" (1543). She quotes an interesting passage from Papineau 2013:

At any stage of an inning, a competent batsman will have assessed the situation and formed a view about how to bat—a conscious intention to adopt a certain strategy. As with any intention, this will then set the parameters of the basic action-control system. It will direct that system to bat aggressively, say. It will take one raft of conditional dispositions from the batsman’s repertoire, and reconfigure that basic control system so that it embodies just those dispositions...Having been so reset, the basic action-control system will then respond accordingly, without any further intrusion of conscious thought’’ Emphasis in original, (2013, p. 191). (1544)

In this paper Fridland goes through a careful examination of the assumptions underlying the strong distinction made by S&K between propositional (intellectual) knowledge and motor acuity (habit or reflex), and shows that these assumptions are not well grounded. She makes use of "optimal control theory" to make her point (Todorov and Jordan 2002; link). Here is the Todorov-Jordan abstract describing this approach:

A central problem in motor control is understanding how the many biomechanical degrees of freedom are coordinated to achieve a common goal. An especially puzzling aspect of coordination is that behavioral goals are achieved reliably and repeatedly with movements rarely reproducible in their detail. Existing theoretical frameworks emphasize either goal achievement or the richness of motor variability, but fail to reconcile the two. Here we propose an alternative theory based on stochastic optimal feedback control. We show that the optimal strategy in the face of uncertainty is to allow variability in redundant (task-irrelevant) dimensions. This strategy does not enforce a desired trajectory, but uses feedback more intelligently, correcting only those deviations that interfere with task goals. From this framework, task-constrained variability, goal-directed corrections, motor synergies, controlled parameters, simplifying rules and discrete coordination modes emerge naturally. We present experimental results from a range of motor tasks to support this theory. (Todorov and Jordon 2002)

One important issue that emerges is the question of where learning occurs as a subject improves his or her skill level. Is it at the reflexive level of motor acuity, or is it at the intellectual and "model-building" level of intention? Here again, Fridland gives reasons to believe that the motor level improves effectiveness through the construction of models of the actions being performed -- or in other words, that there is flexible cognition in play at the motor-acuity level as well as at the strategic, intentional level. Here is the conclusion to her paper:

I hope that it has become clear that a hybrid view of skilled bodily action where the intelligence of skill is cashed out in propositional, intentional terms and motor control is characterized in bottom-up, brute-causal, unintelligent ways is unsustainable. Instead of thinking of independent intentional states and automatic reflex-like basic actions or of independent action trajectories and the execution of those trajectories by processes of motor acuity, it seems that we must revise our view of skill in order to reflect findings which show that even those processes responsible for the automatic, low-level, fine-grained sensorimotor executions of motor skills are sensitive to high-level goals.

This is a place where cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy meet and shed very important new light on the nature of intentionality, action, and bodily skill. It is a very exciting field of research. Joshua Shepherd captures the intellectual challenges of the field very aptly in a recent paper, "Intelligent action guidance and the use of mixed representational formats"; link. Here is the abstract to this paper:

My topic is the intelligent guidance of action. In this paper I offer an empirically grounded case for four ideas: that [a] cognitive processes of practical reasoning play a key role in the intelligent guidance of action, [b] these processes could not do so without significant enabling work done by both perception and the motor system, [c] the work done by perceptual and motor systems can be characterized as the generation of information (often conceptually structured information) specialized for action guidance, which in turn suggests that [d] the cognitive processes of practical reasoning that play a key role in the guidance of intelligent action are not the abstract, syllogistic ones philosophers often treat as the paradigm of practical reasoning. Rather, these cognitive processes are constrained by, and work well with, the specialized concepts outputted by perception and the feedback outputted by sensorimotor processes.

One immediate thought that I had in listening to Elisabeth Pacherie present some of her work at a symposium in Bochum earlier this month is that this approach has the potential of solving the problem Norbert Elias was wrestling with in his own account of action. (Here is an earlier post on figurational sociology; link.) Elias used the example of skilled soccer play and proposed that we need to consider the unit to be the configuration (several players) rather than the individual player. But the real-time cognitive adaptiveness in skilled behavior described in this field of research provides a different and perhaps simpler way of understanding the rapid, intelligent adaptiveness of the players on the soccer field. Their bodily motions are indeed intelligent and adaptive, and their motions and reactions are responsive to the small clues available to them about the motions and intentions of the other players on the field. But at the other end of the research spectrum, it seems evident that research in this area is very relevant to work in robotics and artificial intelligence.

About Me

I am a philosopher of social science with a strong interest in Asia. I have written books on social explanation, Marx, late imperial China, the philosophy of history, and the ethics of economic development. Topics having to do with racial justice in the United States have become increasingly important to me in recent years. All these topics involve the complexities of social life and social change. I have come to see that understanding social processes is in many ways more difficult than understanding the natural world. Take the traditional dichotomy between structure and agency as an example. It turns out that social actions and social structures are reciprocal and inseparable. As Marx believed, “people make their own histories, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” So we cannot draw a sharp separation between social structure and social agency. I think philosophers need to interact seriously and extensively with working social researchers and theorists if they are to be able to help achieve a better understanding the social world.

Open source philosophy

Since 2007 this site addresses a series of topics in the philosophy of social science. What is involved in "understanding society"? The blog is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time. Look at it as "open-source philosophy" -- a web-based, dynamic monograph on the philosophy of social science and some foundational issues about the nature of the social world.

Recent publications

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Digital editions of Varieties of Social Explanation

Digital editions of Varieties of Social Explanation are now available on Kindle and iBooks for iPad. This edition contains the original text of the 1991 edition along with an extensive new introduction, "Philosophy and Social Knowledge."